Callow on Multimodal Texts in Everyday Classrooms

For over 10 years now, leading educators have called on us to recognise that our culture has embraced visual and multimodal texts. It follows that classroom literacy learning should also reflect this cultural shift. Written texts still play a key role as they sit alongside of, as well as integrate with, visual images and electronic media. Everyday classroom literacy learning needs to thoughtfully integrate a variety of texts to support 21st century students. While visual images have been part of school curriculums for many years, in the form of picture books, factual texts, magazine resources, video and more recently electronic resources, it’s both the prevalence and the sophistication of textual resources in more recent times that is significant. Web pages with embedded video, images with electronic tags, hyperlinked online encyclopedias, storybooks that use digitally manipulated pictures, an image-drenched popular culture – it’s no surprise that educators regularly speak about multiple literacies to describe the skills that all learners need.